Don’t Enable Touch ID On Your iPhone If You Value Your Privacy

If you’ve got something to hide - or you just value your privacy - you might want to avoid using Touch ID on your iPhone.

In a first-ever case this week, a woman was forced to provide her fingerprint to the authorities to unlock her iPhone.

If she had used a PIN code, the court could not have opened it.

The woman - Paytsar Bkhchadzhyan - had been arrested on charges of identity theft.

Law professor David Shapiro of Northwestern University said, If you don’t want the cops riffling through your phone, better use the passcode than a fingerprint to lock it.

‘The passcode requires an act of providing information out of your mind, whereas a fingerprint isn’t a statement of any sort, so it’s hard to see that as self-incrimination.

Under U.S. law people can invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating themselves - but touching a screen is not a speech or a statement, so the court ruled it was not self-incriminating.